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Talk:Unknown Aggressors/@comment-37765878-20190331225831/@comment-4061215-20190405063605
I find it curious that this kind of expression of Human superiority over aliens in fiction seems to crop up. -_- The actions the Aggressors have taken against Humankind so far have indicated they are still learning the nature of their new enemy, just as Laconia was trying to discern the nature of the Aggressors (albeit in the most aggressively, military-minded way possible). They know what Humans are is something physical existing in the "substrate" (what the Ring Builders and their creations seem to refer to as the physical universe); they learnt this when ships went dutchman into their space, where they devour the matter of the ships and crew. When the Magnetar class Battleship used its USM Field Projector, it was powerful enough to elicit a reaction from the Aggressors who fired a bullet after it was used to obliterate Pallas. When a ship with antimatter went deliberately 'dutchman' to explode wherever the Aggressors resided, they escalated from passively capturing and devouring ships that just happen to go "dutchman" to an active attack, hitting every system in the Ring network with their consciousness-attacking weapon and devouring everything within the Slow Zone with a living being on it. '''Then, they went on to refine their weapon to more effectively target Human consciousness, '''and it worked. '''The next attack was completely different from the sensation of "hyper-awareness", and knocked everyone out for twenty minutes. Because they are learning how to affect living beings that live in the "substrate" when their initial weapons were tailored towards the Ring Builders, and they knew exactly where to fire their bullets. The Ring Builders were a consciousness not bound to physical matter and developed technology that made the laws of physics - the fabric of reality - their playthings. They created a pocket universe and put a station in there that can take a point-blank hit from a gamma-ray burst and only turn itself into a light-bulb in response. Their bridge-building tool, the protomolecule, already mocked physics as Humans understood it. That's just some of what they accomplished, and then there's what their technology turned Duarte into ''by accident, '' which may speak volumes as to what a Ring Builder's mind could do within what they call the "substrate" (our Universe), and how they're technology was so damn advanced. The Aggressors are different, potentially antithetical to that. If the Ring Builders were a collective consciousness not bound to any physical matter, the Aggressors are conscious beings that exist within ''the foundations of the fabric of reality. Below the space-time that we live in, below the quantum foam and quantum fluctuations. Because of that, locality is a non-issue for them. They can affect everywhere in a specific region of space-time all, whether it be by blacking out all consciousness, or by exciting the fabric of reality enough to boil hydrogen ions into existence. When the Ring Builders presumably burrowed into the fabric of reality to create their pocket universe, and create gates that similarly bent the fabric of space-time to their whim, the Aggressors took notice, targeted where the Ring Builders' conscious minds resided and killed them off until the entire collective was wiped out. Now compare to Humans. Motes of living consciousness bound to physical matter in the substrate, restricted by the laws of physics and locality, which threw an unintentional punch at them with the USM Field Projector, then a deliberate punch with a ship filled with antimatter. Meanwhile, the Aggressors' domain can be called omnipresent - all of which underlies the fabric of reality, even if direct physical influence is restricted to the pocket universe burrowed into their domain. It's unlikely to escalate so far if they can refine their consciousness-targeting weapon to successfully kill every living Human across the solar system...But if they can boil the fabric of space to '''create matter - ''mass-energy - on a system-wide scale to tip a neutron star over the edge, I can only imagine what would happen if they decide that targeting Human consciousness is not enough to kill everyone outside the Slow Zone. "Too stupid to be an actual existential threat for us?" Laconia was stupid enough to draw the direct attention of entities that mess with space-time at the quantum level in the first place.